Absolute Batman Incorporated will have some redrawn and recolored art versus the original issues -- Burnham has redrawn pages that had to be filled in by other artists to meet the shipping schedule, and also some of the bits that had to use New 52 continuity have been retouched (for example, a flashback where Batman saves Talia originally had him in his Jim Lee costume, but has been changed to make it look more like the Jim Aparo costume).

Gotham Academy continues to reintroduce obscure Bat-universe characters. Previously we've had Aunt Harriet as the girls' residence hall director and Bookworm as the school librarian; this issue we've got the Grey Ghost as the drama teacher.

On the whole I thought it was pretty good. I liked the idea of going with lesser-known Bat-villains; Batman has the best rogues gallery in comics but we seldom see the deep cuts. This show has Anarchy, Professor Pyg, Mr. Toad, the Silver Monkey, Humpty Dumpty, Orca -- guys like that. And in the sidekick department, Barbara's in there but she's not Batgirl; Katana is Batman's primary sidekick on the show and the season arc leads up to the assembling of the Outsiders.

Course, that's probably why it got cancelled.

In the back half of the season you get one A-lister (Harvey Dent, up through his accident, though you never see him take off the bandages) and a handful of solid B-listers (Ra's al Ghul, Killer Croc, and, in accordance with the Slade Wilson Act of 2011, fucking Deathstroke).

It was solidly put together, well-cast (Kurtwood Smith as Jim Gordon is a highlight), and the writing is satisfying for the most part.

It DOES feel pretty sparse, thanks to the CG budget; Gotham has never looked so empty. Crowd scenes largely consist of the same half-dozen people showing up. (We get a little more action when Batman's fighting a bunch of guys who are all dressed the same, like the League of Assassins or the GCPD.) This worked out okay for the GL toon since it was set in outer space and it was generally okay for all the locations to be big and empty, but it just doesn't work as well in a setting like this.

I think Harvey Dent was a missed opportunity, too. He's a straight-up antagonist from the get-go; there's really nothing that changes when he becomes Two-Face except that he starts saying "we" instead of "I".

TAS (and Gotham) gave us Harvey as a well-meaning guy with a dark side he was suppressing. TDK gave us a Harvey Dent who was clearly one of the good guys, up until he experienced a tragedy and it broke him. Beware gives us a Harvey Dent who's already an asshole and a villain, and it sure doesn't seem like getting half his face burned really changes anything except his pronouns.

It could have been handled better. If he really HAD been going after Batman out of a legitimate concern for the rule of law, that could have made for a compelling antagonist and a compelling story. Instead, pretty much right off the bat he teams up with Anarchy and Deathstroke to take Batman down. This could work if it were a gradual arc -- Harvey is one of the good guys but as he pursues Batman he makes more and more ethical compromises until he becomes what he's been trying to fight -- but it's not a gradual arc; it happens pretty much immediately.

An alternate take that could have worked: there's a moment where Dent confides to Bruce Wayne that he doesn't really give a fuck about Batman, he's just using the campaign against him for political gain. If THAT kind of...two-faced...behavior had been expanded on better, that could have worked too. But it's not really examined; Harvey's just an asshole.

There are a few other missteps that stand out too. There's a really neat "Batman and friends are trapped in a creepy house and forced to solve a series of deadly puzzles" episode, but the mystery at the core of it is not a fair mystery and its resolution relies on a series of details that the viewers are not privy to. And the last episode, while enjoyable as a big showdown, is a complete fucking mess from a plot perspective. It turns out Batman just leaves the keys to the Batmobile in his belt, so Deathstroke takes them, gets right in the car with no trouble -- even though the car actually notices he is the wrong weight and points it out! -- and presses the Return to Batcave button. Fucking seriously. And then at the end they resolve everything by having Metamorpho transform into a chemical that causes amnesia so Slade will forget that Bruce Wayne is Batman. But they don't bother getting Alfred -- who he knows -- out of the room, so he wakes up with amnesia to look right at Batman standing next to Alfred. I dunno, maybe his ENTIRE memory is erased instead of just the last few months, and he's full-on "Who am I, how did I get here" and doesn't know who Alfred is anymore? This is not explored or commented on.)

On the whole, though, I dug the series, I'm disappointed it was cancelled, and I'd have been happy to see more of it. It's not as good as The Brave and the Bold, but it was pretty solid. And who knows when we'll see another Batman cartoon again at this rate. (There are some direct-to-video ones coming to tie in with the new toy line, but no news on any new series yet.)

Thad wrote:and, in accordance with the Slade Wilson Act of 2011, fucking Deathstroke

Was Deathstroke ever actually a good villain? As far as I'm aware, the most interesting thing about him is that he was voiced by Ron Perlman, and even then he never really made that much sense. That and having sex with an emotionally-unstable 14-year-old girl.

Yeah, as Caleb Goellner put it (as quoted by Chris Sims in Stop Trying To Make Deathstroke The Terminator Happen), "The Judas Contract is the story of a grown-ass man who can’t beat up a bunch of teenagers, so he has sex with an underage girl and sends her to do it instead."

I liked the Perlman version, but it didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense because they just called him "Slade" instead of "Deathstroke" (I assume due to some CN restriction on the word "death" that his since been relaxed) and most of the series revolved around Robin trying to figure out who Slade was despite the fact that Slade is his actual first name. Who was he even supposed to be, if he wasn't actually a guy named Slade Wilson? I'm guessing there was never any plan for any reveal and his identity was always meant as just a MacGuffin. (In keeping, one assumes, with none of the principals ever being seen in their civilian identities or referred to be their real names (except I think maybe Beast Boy when he was reunited with the Doom Patrol; also Cyborg called himself "Stone" when he inviltrated HIVE and Larry's real name was Nosyarg Kcid)).

I think he's one of those guys like Boba Fett who has amassed a dedicated following because people are too dazzled by his cool hat to realize that he kind of sucks.

(He was okay on Arrow too, but I wanted to punch everybody every time they said "Mirakuru". IT'S A GODDAMN ENGLISH WORD. STOP PRONOUNCING IT WITH A JAPANESE ACCENT.)

Thad wrote:(He was okay on Arrow too, but I wanted to punch everybody every time they said "Mirakuru". IT'S A GODDAMN ENGLISH WORD. STOP PRONOUNCING IT WITH A JAPANESE ACCENT.)

While it would make more sense for it to have been something like 'kiseki' (actual native-Japanese word for Miracle) given that it was also World War 2 era, it isn't uncommon in modern Japanese for the Japanese word for a given thing to be the English word for it (or others - part time job, 'arubeito', 'arbeit' is German for working), even in some cases if there is a native Japanese word for it. Japanese also wholesale embraces its loanwords - you use a different alphabet for writing loanwords than you do native ones.

Remember DC has very few decent villains. Batman has lots, Superman has a few, then you have Gorilla Grodd and that's it. Of course they're gonna latch on what amounts to either Evil Cable or Serious Deadpool.

Grath wrote:While it would make more sense for it to have been something like 'kiseki' (actual native-Japanese word for Miracle) given that it was also World War 2 era, it isn't uncommon in modern Japanese for the Japanese word for a given thing to be the English word for it (or others - part time job, 'arubeito', 'arbeit' is German for working), even in some cases if there is a native Japanese word for it. Japanese also wholesale embraces its loanwords - you use a different alphabet for writing loanwords than you do native ones.

But we're not talking about Japanese people using an English word.

We're talking about native fucking English speakers using an English word and pronouncing it with a fucking Japanese accent.

It's weeaboo shit. Like this guy I knew who used to refer to the Maverick Hunters in Mega Man X as "Illregular Hunters". Dude. If you want to call them Irregulars because that's what they're called in Japan, okay, fine. But the word is "irregular". It's a friggin' English word.

zaratustra wrote:Remember DC has very few decent villains. Batman has lots, Superman has a few, then you have Gorilla Grodd and that's it.

I liked what they did with him in Arrow, where (at least in season 1) he's a vaguely-good Australian A.S.I.S agent that keeps Queen alive. That said, he wasn't a particularly deep or interesting character, he was just well-acted and had a cool costume.

Yeah, I decided to leave my post at the Community joke but if I had written a second thing it would have been "I can't understand how John Noble is not one of the most in-demand voice actors in the English-speaking world." He's got the perfect villain voice and gets typecast for that (case in point), but when he was speaking in his regular voice I thought "This guy would be a great Alfred, too." Dude's got range, and I know that even though I've never really gotten around to watching much Fringe.

If I'm counting correctly, IMDb shows he's only done seven voice roles (including this one and another one that hasn't been released yet). That's weird, right?

It's odd, yeah. I've seen him in a few roles since Fringe, but nothing quite seems to fit him as well. His Walter was by far the best reason to watch that show, and while a good amount of that is the writing, I can't imagine anyone else pulling off the fatherly mad scientist bit without making it look hokey.

Considering how good he is at lending an air of dignity to something as batshit goofy as Sleepy Hollow, I'm surprised he hasn't gone more into comic book or cartoon material.